Sociologyhttps://yorkspace.library.yorku.ca/xmlui/handle/10315/27586
Sun, 07 Jun 2020 04:55:22 GMT2020-06-07T04:55:22ZThe Paradox of Refugee Protection in Canada: Law and Bureaucratic Politics of Efficiencyhttps://yorkspace.library.yorku.ca/xmlui/handle/10315/37351
The Paradox of Refugee Protection in Canada: Law and Bureaucratic Politics of Efficiency
Masoumi, Azar
Over the course of the past few decades, access to refugee rights has been both expanded and restricted across the liberal democratic world. On the one hand, groups that previously had no ground for protection, such as domestically-abused women and sexual minorities, are now commonly considered legitimate refugees by liberal states. On the other hand, access to refugee systems and rights in the liberal world has become increasingly more restricted. This dissertation takes Canada as the site of its study to examine the paradoxical developments in access to refugee protection in the past thirty years. I draw on archival, interview, media and organizational data to argue that the Canadian refugee protection regime is a dynamic, complex and conflictual articulation of an expansionist and humanitarian impetus as well as a pragmatic and restrictionist compulsion. I suggest that these contradictory impulses are symptomatic of the paradoxical project of state-controlled refugee protection: the paradox of ensuring universal equality of rights through the exclusionary mechanisms of the nation-state. I further argue that the Canadian regime of refugee protection remains relatively stable despite its internal contradictions, by placing its conflictual impulses in systematic and structural arrangements. First, while expansions are primarily, although not exclusively, achieved in the field of legislation and jurisprudence, restrictions are, in large part, accomplished in administrative and bureaucratic fields. Second, while expansions in refugee rights emerge around tightly bounded categories of Convention refugees, gender-based claimants, and sexual orientation and gender identity refugees, restrictions concern ever-shifting, institutionally manufactured, and often nationally demarcated groups of excludable claimants. I suggest that these articulated arrangements maintain state-controlled refugee protection in place despite its internal paradoxes and keep refugee protection a promise that is never fully fulfilled.
Mon, 11 May 2020 00:00:00 GMThttps://yorkspace.library.yorku.ca/xmlui/handle/10315/373512020-05-11T00:00:00ZRohingyas in Bangladesh: Owning Rohingya Identity in Disowning Spaceshttps://yorkspace.library.yorku.ca/xmlui/handle/10315/36310
Rohingyas in Bangladesh: Owning Rohingya Identity in Disowning Spaces
This dissertation focuses on Rohingya people, with a special emphasis on Rohingya youth and young adults, and how they construct their identities. While Rohingya ethnic identity is deeply rooted in Burma, it is influenced by how they grow up and reach adulthood within a protracted situation in Bangladesh. Many Rohingya youth and young adults find it complicated to define who they are because they belong to a place, Burma, that does not consider them citizens, and they reside in a place, Bangladesh, that never recognizes them as residents. The uncertainty around Rohingya identity raises several questions: How does the experience of displacement and refugeeness in Bangladesh shape identity among Rohingya people, particularly among the youth and young adults? What is Rohingya identity? In what ways do they retain their Rohingya identity in the context of their non-citizen status in Bangladesh? While they are stateless, how are the social rights of citizenship experienced by Rohingya people?
Using ethnographic methods, I spent nine months in Coxs Bazar, Bangladesh, between 2014 and 2016 to collect data for this research. I interviewed 44 Rohingya people. Rohingyas first arrived in Bangladesh in 1978. After that, many Rohingya people were born and/or raised in Bangladeshi refugee camps, and have never left, while others were forcefully repatriated by Bangladeshi government and then forced to return to Bangladesh again by the Burmese government during 1992-1993 (Abrar, 1995; Pittaway, 2008; Loescher & Milner, 2008; Ullah, 2011; Murshid, 2014).
The findings of my research show that due to living in oppressive conditions, uncertainty, and the lack of an appropriate social environment, Rohingya people struggle with forming their identity. Their liminality, statelessness, and lack of rights have created an unsettled and hybrid form of identity for many youth and youth adults living within and outside the refugee camps. In this dissertation, I first describe the lives of Rohingya refugees, then I examine individual constructions of identity and how their sense of belonging is influenced by their refugeeness and lack of legal citizenship. Rohingya peoples struggle with identity formation can only be resolved when the Rohingya crisis comes to an end.
Tue, 02 Jul 2019 00:00:00 GMThttps://yorkspace.library.yorku.ca/xmlui/handle/10315/363102019-07-02T00:00:00ZAutonomy, Identity and the Right to Die: A Qualitative Study of Medically Assisted Death Attitudes in the Canadian Contexthttps://yorkspace.library.yorku.ca/xmlui/handle/10315/36274
Autonomy, Identity and the Right to Die: A Qualitative Study of Medically Assisted Death Attitudes in the Canadian Context
In Canada, medically-assisted death has been legal since June 17th, 2016, when Bill C-14 received royal assent in the Canadian legislature. The legal proceedings around MAiD in Canada have been supported by non-governmental organizations and advocacy groups, for and against MAiD. The legalization of MAiD is the culmination of decades of organization and advocacy, supported by generally favourable public opinion. In this dissertation, the author develops a theory to explain why individuals increasingly identify with pro-MAiD beliefs. The study consequently makes two contributions to the sociological literature; 1) it reveals the connections between autonomy, care work, humanism, and pro-MAiD identities; 2) it features the development of a critical realist social psychology, focused on the reflexivity and the creation of personal moral identity.
Specifically, the study is focused on how lived experiences of death including caregiving, bereavement, and/or serious illness, inform pro-MAiD beliefs for volunteers and other actors involved with pro-euthanasia organizations. The author theorizes that pro-MAiD identities are centred primarily on the principle of autonomy, which is couched within humanist and naturalist cultural frameworks, and enacted through care work. Specifically, over the course of care work, volunteers and other movement participants witnessed what they perceived as a fundamental loss of identity by the people for whom they were caring. The loss of identity witnessed by these carers motivated them to pursue greater autonomy over their own deaths, and to therefore avoid the deterioration they witnessed in others. It also motivated them to act as social carriers for the dissemination of norms associated with pro-MAiD political stances.
Tue, 02 Jul 2019 00:00:00 GMThttps://yorkspace.library.yorku.ca/xmlui/handle/10315/362742019-07-02T00:00:00ZThe Making and Reproduction of Male Working-Class Identity in a Mining Townhttps://yorkspace.library.yorku.ca/xmlui/handle/10315/36257
The Making and Reproduction of Male Working-Class Identity in a Mining Town
This dissertation is a study of working-class identity and subjectivity among a sample of male nickel miners in Sudbury, Ontario. Recent foreign takeovers of mining firms and a protracted strike at Vale-Inco in 2009-2010 motivate this dissertations new look at class relations and subjectivity in one of Canadas most historically significant regions of working-class organization. This study understands these recent events as part of a set of decades long economic processes that have transformed workers lives in and outside work. It explores how the form that trade unionism took in the post-WWII period has shaped class relations and class identity among male nickel miners in Sudbury. The dissertation asks: how have class subjectivity and socioeconomic change interacted over this history?
After first analyzing the political economy of mining in the Sudbury Basin, the dissertation traces the formation of historically situated class subjectivities. In it, I examine how the postwar compromise between capital and labour influenced unionization and class identity among male workers at the mines. I then inquire into how industrial restructuring and job loss, the rise of new managerial strategies and neoliberal governance, and the growth of precarious, contract labour have transformed both the material contexts of workers lives and their practices of reproducing their identities as members of a working class.
To form the central arguments of the dissertation, I draw on 26 oral history interviews with current and retired workers, and organize their narratives into three thematic areas of class identity: first, issues of work and the labour process; second, themes of place, space, and belonging in the formation of class identities; and third, how historical memory and generational conflict influence class. Within and across these thematic areas I show how material conditions and workers own practices of identity formation interact, adjust, and at times, contradict. I argue that the postwar class compromise between labour and capital contributed to a resilient form of working-class subjectivity among workers that is reproduced by local processes of social remembering and class reproduction. Yet, industrial restructuring, the growth of precarious employment, and the internationalization of ownership and management at the mines challenge the efficacy of this historical subjectivity. By studying unionized workers who are confronting profound industrial change, this dissertation raises questions about how the making of male working-class identity limited broader processes of class formation, as well as how we understand class and class formation in the global economy at a time when labour movements face growing structural challenges.
Tue, 02 Jul 2019 00:00:00 GMThttps://yorkspace.library.yorku.ca/xmlui/handle/10315/362572019-07-02T00:00:00Z